“Anonymous,” a costume spectacle directed by Roland Emmerich, from a script by John Orloff, is a vulgar prank on the English literary tradition, a travesty of British history and a brutal insult to the human imagination. Apart from that, it’s not bad.

First things first. The film’s premise is that the plays and poems commonly attributed to William Shakespeare are actually the work of Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford. This notion, sometimes granted the unwarranted dignity of being called a theory, is hardly new. It represents a hoary form of literary birtherism that has persisted for a century or so, in happy defiance of reason and evidence. The arrival of “Anonymous” has roused Shakespeareans more learned than I to the weary task of re-debunking — in the past two weeks The New York Times has published both an Op-Ed piece and a Sunday magazine Riff opposing the Oxfordian position — and to their cogent arguments I can offer only a small corrective. This is a Roland Emmerich film. (At least I assume it is, though I guess, in the spirit of the enterprise, I should be open to other possibilities. Joe Swanberg? Brett Ratner? Zhang Yimou? It all seems eerily plausible, once you start to think about it.)

My point is that it might be a mistake to suppose that the director of “10,000 B.C.” — to mention only the most salient example — should be taken as a reliable guide to history. Perhaps he and Mr. Orloff (“Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole”), rather than advancing the case for Edward de Vere, set out to undermine it by exposing the absurd prejudices and fallacies on which the hypothesis rests. These can be boiled down to a sentimental and reactionary fantasy of class. How could Shakespeare, the half-educated son of an unlettered provincial glove maker, have written all those masterpieces? Surely it is more plausible to suppose that they were the work of one of his betters.

“Anonymous” has great fun with this insight, and it is amusing to watch Rafe Spall turn his Shakespeare into a shallow, duplicitous fraud (not to mention a whoremonger, a blackmailer and a murderer). Rhys Ifans, who plays the Earl of Oxford, is a touching picture of aristocratic melancholy, his long face and hooded eyes suggesting the weariness of a decent, disappointed soul. The poor Earl, prevented by family circumstances from pursuing his literary dreams, has spent a lifetime quilling up secret masterpieces about gloomy Danish princes, midsummer night’s dreams and other curious subjects.

When he was younger (and played, poutily and prettily, by Jamie Campbell Bower), Edward presented his pieces at court, where they delighted the young Queen Elizabeth I (Joely Richardson) so much that she went to bed with him. Later, when she has aged into a regal Vanessa Redgrave (Ms. Richardson’s mother), she will be so worked up by a “Shakespearean” performance that she will be compelled to undo the buttons of her bodice.

The filmmakers take a literal view of the power of poetry in the public arena as well. Give the masses a play with a hunchbacked villain, and they will take to the streets against an actual hunchback (Sir Robert Cecil, played by Edward Hogg. David Thewlis is Sir Robert’s equally sinister father, William, Elizabeth’s most trusted and least trustworthy adviser, as well as de Vere’s father-in-law).

It is an Oxfordian commonplace that de Vere composed some of his history plays (“Henry V,”“Richard III”) to assert some behind-the-scenes influence over the affairs of state. “Anonymous” gives him complicated reasons for wanting to keep King James of Scotland off the English throne once Elizabeth is gone, and to sustain the Tudor line by promoting the ascendance of the Earl of Southampton (Xavier Samuel). The Earl of Southampton is a close friend of the Earl of Essex (Sam Reid), to whom de Vere is close for reasons that may shock you, or else reduce you to incredulous giggling.

“All plays are political,” Edward de Vere insists, and “Anonymous” proposes as a corollary that only political players can produce theater of real consequence. A mere professional, like Shakespeare or his colleague and sometime rival Ben Jonson, could never dream of committing masterpieces like “King Lear” or “Macbeth.” Only an inspired, noble amateur could achieve such greatness. The history of English letters refutes this notion at almost every turn — there are far more hacks than gentlemen to be found in the canon — and it seems disingenuous for Hollywood hacks to be endorsing it.

Or maybe just modest. Still, the show-business professionalism that “Anonymous” goes to such great lengths to disdain turns out to be its saving virtue. As a work of serious history, it is beyond useless. You would never know that Ben Jonson, played with thick-tongued mopiness by Sebastian Armesto, was a great comic writer, nor that Elizabeth was a shrewd and ruthless political operator, as opposed to the dreamy, dithering mooncalf depicted here. (Don’t get me started on poor Christopher Marlowe.) And yet there is no reason to deny Mr. Emmerich and Mr. Orloff the liberties that Shakespeare himself — and I do mean Shakespeare, the commercial entertainer, not some sad peer of the realm — was so free in taking.

Photo

Vanessa Redgrave as Queen Elizabeth I in the film, which posits that an earl wrote the works attributed to Shakespeare.Credit
Reiner Bajo/Columbia Pictures

Which is not to say that “Anonymous” rises to any great heights of art. Only, as I said before, that it is in many ways not bad. Mr. Orloff’s puffed-up dialogue is enlivened by infusions of actual Shakespeare, some of it performed by Mark Rylance, one of Shakespeare’s leading modern interpreters. (It is, by contrast, a little depressing to see another, Derek Jacobi, lending his imprimatur to this folly in the role of a present-day narrator). The production design (by Sebastian T. Krawinkel) and the costumes (by Lisy Christl) are superb, blending with Anna J. Foerster’s dark and rich cinematography to produce a plausibly Elizabethan atmosphere, with interiors that often look like Holbein paintings.

And in the end the players are the thing. Mediocre actors are often undone by great material, but good ones can burnish even meretricious nonsense with craft and conviction. And so it is here. Ms. Redgrave and Mr. Ifans are so full of feeling, Mr. Thewlis and Mr. Hogg are so full of bile and fanaticism, and Mr. Spall is so full of baloney that you are tempted to suspend disbelief, even if Mr. Emmerich finally makes it impossible.

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Directed by Roland Emmerich; written by John Orloff; director of photography, Anna J. Foerster; edited by Peter R. Adam; music by Thomas Wander and Harald Kloser; production design by Sebastian T. Krawinkel; costumes by Lisy Christl; produced by Mr. Emmerich, Larry Franco and Robert Léger; released by Columbia Pictures. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes.

A version of this review appears in print on October 28, 2011, on Page C1 of the New York edition with the headline: How Could a Commoner Write Such Great Plays?. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe